


Sharing a Park Bench Like Bookends

by tobinlaughing



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Feels, Gen, Growing Old, Hospital, good news/bad news
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-31
Updated: 2013-03-31
Packaged: 2017-12-07 01:37:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/742653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tobinlaughing/pseuds/tobinlaughing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain America led the Howling Commandos through some of the most hellish battlegrounds of WWII. Now he has a chance to reconnect with one of his old comrades.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sharing a Park Bench Like Bookends

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by lyrics from Simon & Garfunkel's song "Old Friends" from the album "Bookends".

_Old friends  
winter companions, the old men  
wrapped in their overcoats, waiting for the sun..._

 

“You know, it's really cool of you to do this.”

Steve snaps out of his doze, rolling his head off the back of the backseat with a short snort. His driver/handler is peering at him in the rearview mirror, dark sunglasses discarded on the dashboard.  
The drive has been almost silent prior to this, two and a half hours upstate so far with about a half hour to go. Steve squints out the window, trying to discern where they are, before belatedly responding, “'Scuse me?”

“It's nice. That you're doing this. I mean, you know. Old people always complain about never seeing their grandkids and being in homes and stuff.”

The handler's name was Agent Nichols and Steve hasn't spent a whole lot of time with him; normally if he goes on plainclothes missions for SHIELD Barton or Romanov accompanies him. By and large he likes the agents he's met but he would have preferred not being handled by a new guy for this trip—not an assignment, but a personal kind-of mission. This wasn't something he'd have chosen to do, but it was certainly something he had to do.

“Yeah. Well, he's not my grandfather, but he's ...well, I need to see him before...” Steve doesn't want to finish the statement so he just shrugs. Nichols nods. 

“Yeah, I get ya. There was a dude on my block growing up, nice old guy, I think he was in his sixties or so. Coached our peewee soccer team til we were all in junior league, then coached us all through middle school and high school. Mr. O'Neil, gosh. Nice old guy. Kept us going, taught us all a bunch of lessons, stuff like that. Like a grandpa to all the kids my block.”

“He sounds like a great guy.”

“Well, we thought so. Found out in high school that he'd been burying people's pets in the dirt floor in his basement. We all thought there were coyotes or something taking our dogs and cats after dark. Turns out Mr O'Neil was trying out taxedermy in his spare time.” Nichols is quiet for a second, then: “We had posters up for my sister's cat for six months. She always thought Charlie would come home.”

Well, that got dark real quick, Steve thought, at a complete loss. “Uh, I'm—I'm sorry...?”

“Yeah, thanks. But hey, your guy, I bet he never skinned a kid's pet for fun. I'm sure he's still a real nice guy, yeah?”

They drive for another twenty-two minutes (it would have been twenty, but Steve made Nichols stop at a Hallmark store to get a card and a mixed bouquet) before pulling up to the subtly intimidating front gate of the SHIELD-sponsored retirement community. Nichols gives their credentials to the gate guards and they're waved through, and Steve is suddenly no longer slogging through a murk of obligation and resignation, because there are frogs jumping in his bellies and he is sweating and honestly and very frankly nervous. 

The reveal had been as gentle as SHIELD could make it: Romanov had sat him down over lunch and mentioned that a former deputy director had a very important birthday coming up and would probably appreciate a visit from the only other surviving member of the Howling Commandos. Steve had been tempted to rage, to punch a hole in the wall, or at least pull out a load of passive-aggressive righteous indignation at having been kept in the dark at the existence of one of his comrades, but Romanov had speared him with that deep, laser-beam gaze of hers and, without saying a word, managed to convince him to just drop the attitude and take the fucking drive upstate to visit his friend. 

So now he is standing outside the door of a room in a very impressive and luxurious facility—made all the more impressive for the subtleties and strengths of its extensive security features—and trying to make himself knock and open the door. Would there be a fleet of machines? Respirators and heart monitors and IV stands and all the other alien machinery that makes him so afraid and weary at the same time of the way life doesn't seem to end in this century. 

 

He was also well aware of the irony inherent in his dislike. 

 

Nichols, leaning against the nurses' station at the other end of the hallway, catches his eye, smiles, and makes little shoo-shoo gestures, before he turns back to smile at the little blonde behind the desk. Steve sighs and raises his hand to knock--

“Fer Chrissakes, just open the damn door already.”

Dugan doesn't look that bad, truth be told. He's sitting up in bed and there are a few machines—none that are currently beeping, none hooked up to him at all—but he's dressed, legs crossed as he looks through a magazine. He seems to be waiting for someone and is shocked when he finally looks up from his article in...yep, he's still reading Sports Illustrated. For the articles, of course, Steve thinks, even though this newest incarnation of the magazine tends to feature impossibly thin models who prefer a bare minimum of clothing. 

“Captain. Holy...”

“H-hey, Dum-Dum.” He cringes as he says it, he meant to say sergeant, or sir, or even just Dugan, but the old nickname comes readily to his lips and it's out before he can stop it. Ol' Tim—Dum-Dum-- he grins, fit to split his face and scrambles, almost spry, from the bed. He's tripping over his own stocking feet to get to the doorway and Steve meets him more than halfway, catching him under the arms in a half-hug/half carry and Dum-Dum claps his arms around him, laughing and coughing.

“Steve Rogers. Rogers!” Dugan pulls back to look at him and grins again. “Goddamn Captain America!”

Dugan is still a big man, still broad through the shoulders and thick through the waist and wrists, but he's completely bald and his face is scored with wrinkles and scars. Looks like he's still got all his own teeth under that godawful moustache, but his eyes, bright with happy tears, are rheumy and faded. There is a deep scar that creases the skin from Dugan's forehead down through his left eyebrow and over his cheekbone and Steve thinks he knows how that one happened—a knife fight with an enemy soldier, probably, with Dugan either too confident or too old or a little tipsy and not as quick as he could have been. Dugan sees him notice it, and his grin turns into a smirk.  
“Just after you went down. V-E day. We were clearing out one of the—you know about the death camps?”

“Yeah.” Darcy Lewis has been tutoring him in political and cultural history, and the liberation of Auschwitz was where she started.

“Most of those sons-a-bitches laid down arms easy enough, but a few didn't go quietly. This one, a guard for this cat called Shaw...must've liked his boss a lot. A real whole lot. Almost took my eye.”

 

“Yeah.” Steve is probably going to go through this whole day not knowing what to say.

“So New York--” Thank God Dum Dum knows what to say. Always did. Big, brash, bluff fella, but good with people. “--that was you? Really you?”

“Yeah, that was me. Dammit, Dum-Dum, it's good to see you.”

“Christ, Cap, yeah. Jesus Christ it's good to see you, too.” Now Dugan looks down and sees the card and flowers, and he laughs. “What is this, Cap? A date?”

Steve blushes bright red, and it's like there haven't been eighty years between their last and latest conversations. 

They sit, and talk, and share brandy and cigars—Dugan has privileges, apparently, that extend to smoking in his rooms (“...and thank Christ I'm not on oxygen, even after the second heart attack...”)--and after about two hours a nurse comes in to take Dugan's vitals and administer three pills: one red, two white, each about the size of of a goddamn shotgun shell. Dugan chases them with water, and chases the water with another sip of brandy. Steve doesn't know how to ask, so he doesn't and goes back to asking about the rest of the Howlers: Morita, Jones, Dernier, Falsworth. Another hour goes by before Steve can't avoid asking a different question.

“So, Peggy....”

“Ah.” Dugan leans back in his chair, tapping his cigar out the open window. “Was wondering when you'd suck it up enough to ask about her. Yeah, Peggy stuck with the SSR through the changeover, but she got tapped for MI6, same as Falsworth.”

“You all kept in touch, huh?”

“Yeah. Actually it was mostly Peggy who kept it up; she sent us Christmas and birthday cards every year. Always a nice letter. Yeah, she got assigned as the SHIELD liaison for MI6 so we'd see her every once in a while. From what I know, Falsworth got assigned as counterintel on the Reds. Spent about fifteen years in Berlin before the Wall came down. Ol' limey bastard just couldn't find his way outta Germany.”

“And was she...Peggy, was she....happy? Did she... Did she get the chance to have a, a good life?”

Dugan nods. “Yeah, Cap, she did. Phillips stumped pretty hard to keep her on staff and I guess her appointment to MI6 came from pretty high up in the end. She, ah, she got married, well, later than most folks, I guess. Never had kids. She, ah, she passed away. Couple years ago now.”

“Yeah, yeah. I, uh, I heard that.” And he had: he'd looked up all the Howlers, had seen some of their files; those who'd gotten out after the war—his war, or another war—had been declassified, like Morita and Jones. Falsworth, Dum-Dum, Dernier and Peggy had all stayed in service somewhere or another and had remained classified. 

They're quiet for a while, Steve finishing his cigar and Dugan swirling the remaining brandy in his glass around the ice cubes so that they tinkle against the glass. It occurs to Steve that Dugan moves well, for a nonagenarian: there is no palsy in his hands, liver-spotted though they are; his knuckles and vertebrae remain straight and uninflamed with arthritis or rheumatism. Sure he's lost his hair and his earlobes are stretched; sure his eyebrows look like two snowy caterpillars and his moustache could be made of bailing wire, but Dugan's aged well. The euphoria of finding him so unchanged returns, and Steve has to break the silence.

“Well, I'm glad for her. For you. All of you,” he says finally, and he is. “You all deserved a chance to be happy, and to have a good life. I'm glad,” he repeats, and knocks back his brandy, wishing for the thousanth time that he could get drunk. Erskein should have told him about that; he'd have had the schnapps with him, procedural preparations be damned, if he'd known it would be the last time he'd feel the effects of alcohol. 

They talk more, about safer things: what happened to Coney Island and the Yankees; the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK's assassination (and when he and Darcy Lewis cover that, later in his lessons, he will have to bite down hard on what Dum-Dum has told him, because Darcy Lewis will not know the things he finds out this afternoon about two men named Oswald, a grassy knoll, and the man driving Kennedy's car). Before he knows it, the sun has set and the floor nurse, the doctor, and Agent Nichols have poked their heads into the room.

“Sir? Visiting hours are almost over,” Nichols reminds him. Steve can't make this a long visit because there is a training mission that he put off for this visit, waiting for him back at SHIELD headquarters, one that didn't have to be done right away. He isn't surprised to find that he's already mentally preparing a list of things to bring to his next visit: a bottle of whiskey, a box of cigars to replace the ones they've smoked this afternoon; disc recordings of the 1978 World Series, which Steve has yet to get to watch. He shakes Dugan's hand and hugs him again, clapping the old man on the shoulder as the floor nurse gets Dugan to settle back on the bed so she can check his vitals. 

“You take good care, Cap,” Dum-Dum says from the bed, reaching a hand out for one more shake. He is pale in the light from the fluorescent lamp over his head. Steve clasps his hand one more time and smiles.

“Hey, you too, Dum-Dum.” That elicits another smile. “I got training this weekend, but I'll be back soon's as I get some down time. You still play checkers like a circus bear?”

“Sure, Cap, sure, I'll be happy to play all the checkers you like,” Dugan replies. For the first time that day he sounds aged and with a start Steve is all too aware again that Tim Dugan is over 90 years old. The skin on top of his head is stretched tight and thin, showing liver spots and veins. His hands, so solid before, have begun a slight trembling. He's tired. I've worn him out, Steve realizes, but has a hard time feeling guilty about reuniting with an old buddy.

The nurse hands Dugan three more pills; this time two of them are red and only one is white. She follows them into the corridor. Steve glances back over his shoulder as she closes the door behind them and it looks like Dugan is already asleep. “Doctor,” he says quietly, stopping her at the nurses' station. “I know you probably can't tell me, but I was wondering what medications you have him on. Those look like horse tranquilizers you gave him.”

She gives him a level look, as if scanning his security clearance with her eyes. Apparently he's high enough, because she sighs and tells him, “He's on an experimental medication that's proprietary to SHIELD medical for now—those are the white pills. The red pills aren't horse tranquilizers, just enough morphine to drop an elephant.”

Steve and Nichols stare at her. “He didn't sound like he was drugged, and we were talking all afternoon.”

“It's a morphine derivative—again, proprietary to SHIELD medical. Keeps him lucid and keeps the pain at a manageable level. Conversation like you two were having, that helps keep him focused. We're giving him the best life possible here, Captain. We owe him that much.”

“But what's—I mean, he didn't look sick. What's it for?”

She puts her hand over his on the counter. “Tumors, Captain. Sergeant Dugan has malignant tumors in every organ below his ribcage. The white pills are keeping them from growing but the damage they've already done is too far gone for us to reverse. We're trying to keep him comfortable while we can.” She squeezes his fingers. He barely feels it. Her voice seems to be coming at him from down a very, very long corridor and from years and years away. “You visiting probably did more for him in a few hours than we've been able to do in the last eighteen months.”

“You mean he's...Dum-Dum, he's....”

“I'm so very sorry, Captain. But he's worked hard for this country his whole life, and it's been a long life, as I'm sure you know. Even with as much technology as we've got, he's still an old man, and we're out of things to do for him besides this. He's comfortable, and today he was happy. Hang on to that for him.”

_Can you imagine us years from today,  
sharing a park bench quietly?  
How suddenly strange to be seventy..._


End file.
